Roller Developer Resources

This page offers a list of guides, howtos, and other resources to help developers who are working on the Roller source code.

Development Guides

How to contribute to Roller Explains how to contribute, what a committer is, etc. Read this if you want to figure out how to get your changes into Roller or if you'd interested in helping out with any other aspects of Roller.

Building and Deploying Roller A guide on how to get the Roller source code from our subversion repository, how the code is laid out and where to look for things, what the standard build process includes, and how to run the unit tests. This should be the first thing you read if you are planning to work on the Roller code base at all.

Release Process This document describes the process that the Roller team uses to propose new releases, make milestone builds, make final releases and how we use the SVN trunk, branches and tags.

How to create a Roller theme Two part series on how to create a new Roller theme:

How to add new model objects How to make new data available to Roller template authors TBD. For now, check out the ApacheCon 2007 presentation. Also, this email explains how to find and use an example object plugin with docs.

ApacheCon 2007 - Roller and blogs as a web development platform (1.6mb PDF) In this session how to use blogs as a development platform. You'll learn about standards-based approaches that use RSS, Atom and XML-RPC and some approaches specific to the Roller blog server. You'll learn how to use web services to automate web publishing, how to use blog server plugins to integrate new sources of data into your blog server, how generate dynamic feeds with JRuby in Roller and how to use a planet server to create custom feeds for your applications.

ApacheCon 2006 - Apache Roller: an open source Java blog server (1.3mb PDF) Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives the popular Sun's employee blogs at blogs.sun.com, IBM developerWorks blogs, JRoller.com and numerous other blog sites. Currently making its way through the Apache incubation process, Roller is built on a host of Apache technologies including Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Jakarta Commons, XMLRPC and more. This overview, a primer for Roller users and contributors, covers the Roller feature set, the all-new Roller 3.0 page models/macros, Roller 3.0 architecture, lessons learned, project status and future plans.